Many main line Protestants have no issue with saying that the Catholic church was the church founded by Jesus, and that the bible was defined by the Catholic faith, and that the Church had authority to interpret scriptures etc, but that this was somehow lost through corruption. Then the Protestants re-claimed the original church authority, etc. by making the church back to what it was supposed to be.
That is not a “mainline” Protestant view. The more common view among mainline Protestants is that the Church has always been diverse and has always been imperfect.
I know few Protestants, if any, who think that Protestants (in whole or in part) have the kind of authority that Catholics claim. And pretty much all mainliners and most evangelicals think that whatever authority Protestants have is shared by the Catholic Church–not that it was somehow “lost” but that it was never exclusive.
I know many Protestants who sincerely feel this way.
So none of the arguments about how the Catholic church was the one true church, wrote/compiled the biblle, etc., works because they just agree, but then say that this was lost through corruption.
Certainly many Protestants make a distinction between the Church today and the early Church, if that’s what you are saying.
In particular, some of these folks are Baptist, some are Methodist. I also know some LDS who make this point.
One other thing, they all claim to be united on this point. Sometimes it just feels anti-Catholic for the sake of being anti-Catholic.
But I would love a good answer to have if there is one. Something to help with their stumbling block.
People on this forum seem to know a lot more anti-Catholic Methodists than I’ve run into.
Although perhaps that isn’t true–my mother just told me about a very contentious Sunday School class she and my father were in this morning in which everyone else (in a Methodist church in Kentucky) was maintaining a basically Baptist theology of salvation and she was driven pretty much to tears because they made her feel like a sanctimonious defender of works righteousness for saying that being holy really was part of the package of being a Christian
So I know that a lot of Methodists, especially in the South, have picked up a lot of Baptist attitudes, and the anti-Catholicism no doubt comes along with that (the teacher in my mother’s Sunday School class is an ex-Catholic from Nigeria whose brother is a priest–ironically, I have stopped attending the class with my parents owing to a time conflict with RCIA. . . . )
Anyway, while most Protestants will talk about corruption in the Church as a justification for the Reformation, the more moderate ones (usually including Methodists) do not think that this meant that the Church ceased to be the Church. Rather, they would say that the Church is composed of all those who believe in Jesus, and whatever authority the Church has is possessed by this universal body of believers and local communities expressing the Church in a particular place.
Some do have an unrealistic idea of how unified the early Church was, not realizing that in fact there were sincere believers in Jesus with basically orthodox theology (like the Montanists or Donatists) who were outside the early Catholic Church. (Of course, fundamentalists take the opposite tack, typically arguing that these groups were the true Church and that–absurdly–they believed essentially the same things modern fundamentalists believe.)
Two final notes:
- I think you are using “mainline” differently from the way it’s normally used. I’m not sure what you mean by it. Usually it means the older, more liberal denominations.
- Confessional Protestants–the conservative adherents of the original Lutheran and Reformed traditions–will often make pretty strong claims of authority for their traditions as “reformed Catholicism,” which more or less matches what you are describing (though they still don’t have the same view of authority as Catholics, since they hold that the true Church is defined by holding true doctrine and not by apostolic succession or union with Rome, and of course they reject the idea that some divinely revealed apostolic tradition wa preserved in the Church but not recorded in Scripture). Baptists would have trouble making this point, since they reject any visible church beyond the local congregation (though Southern Baptists in recent decades have started sounding more and more like confessional Protestants). And Methodists do not claim in any sense to be the true Church and are usually (again I recognize there are lots of exceptions) very ecumenical.
Edwin
